The Return of History at Long Timescales

Talk to many scientists involved in computational social science, complex systems, and related fields, and at a certain point, someone will mention psychohistory. A fictional field founded by Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation trilogy, this field is devoted to using mathematical principles to predict the large-scale behavior of societies. Since that is the goal of much of these quantitative social sciences (at least ideally), it turns out that many scientists in these disciplines were inspired by psychohistory. (I am actually currently compiling a list of researchers who have mentioned psychohistory as an inspiration. Contact me if you want to be included.)

At one time, the field of history was also involved in such large-scale thinking: examining the long sweep of history and looking for patterns within it. In fact, Isaac Asimov was inspired to write Foundation by Edward Gibbon’s sweeping The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But more recently, historians began examining smaller time frames and tinier issues. Why did this happen? And is there a return to longer timescales currently under way?

Historians of this generation began to rethink their relationship to archives and audiences, in a quest both for collective professional independence and individual success in an increasingly competitive field. The need to specialize became ever more acute. Archival mastery became the index of specialization and temporal focus became ever more necessary.

This specialization, along with other factors leading to the examination of short timescales, resulted in historical research into briefer time periods beginning around the 1970’s. But it seems we are at last returning to the longue durée:

And even a cursory scan of recent arrivals on the history bookshelves turns up a host of long-range histories, of around-the-world travel over 500 years; of the first 3000 years of Christianity; of genocide «from Sparta to Darfur» and guerrilla warfare «from ancient times to the present»; of the very «shape» of human history over the last 15,000 years; and of a host of similar grand topics directed to wide reading publics.

By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep — taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.

Because as beautiful as a snapshot is, how much richer is a moving picture, one that allows us to see how processes and interactions unfold over time?

We’re a species that evolves over ages — not just short hype cycles — so we can’t ignore datasets of long timescale. They offer us much more information than traditional datasets of big data that only span several years or even shorter time periods.

As Armitage and Guldi note:

The arrival in the past five years of mass digitization projects in the libraries and crowd-sourced oral histories online announced an age of easy access to a tremendous amount of archival material. Coupled with the constructive use of tools for abstracting knowledge—such as the Google N-gram, the wordle, and Paper Machines—these digital tools invite scholars to constantly try out historical hypotheses across the time scale of centuries.

And they conclude at a suitably grand scale:

In the era of longue-durée tools, when experimenting across centuries becomes part of the toolkit of every graduate student, conversations about the appropriate audience and application of large-scale examinations of history are becoming part of the fabric of every history department. We should not constrain them to the mere Anthropocene or the merely Marxist, but we would be wise to take instruction from the utopian aspirations of both those genres, and to welcome back a key of writing history that takes seriously an ambition to reconfigure public discourse and to reorient policy.

The return of the longue durée is intimately connected to changing questions of scale. In a moment of ever-growing inequality, amid crises of global governance, and under the impact of anthropogenic climate change, even a minimal understanding of the conditions shaping our lives demands a scaling-up of our inquiries. As the longue durée returns, in a new guise with new goals, it still demands a response to the most basic issues of historical methodology—of what problems we selected, how we choose the boundaries of our topic, and what tools we put to solving the question. The power of memory can return us directly to the forgotten powers of history as a discipline to persuade, to reimagine, and to inspire. Renaissance historian Constantin Fasolt has argued that thinking about early modern civic institutions was largely premised on what he calls an attitude of «historical revolt». In light of this, the new historians of the longue durée should be inspired to use history to criticize the institutions around us and to return history to its mission as a critical social science. History can provide the basis for a rejection of anachronisms founded on deference to longevity alone. Thinking with history—but only with long swathes of that history—may help us to choose which institutions to bury as dead and which we might want to keep alive.

The paper has much more than my selected quotes indicate. It is well worth reading in its entirety. And long live psychohistory!